Friday, March 29, 2013

I've seen the screen capture on the
front page of sites, and it's been impossible to miss. And because
Marvel included it in a TV commercial, it feels like all bets are off.
No one considers that a spoiler anymore.

I can tell you that in my own house, if I were to tell my wife any story
element of "Iron Man 3," I would be severely punished for my
transgression. She would not be pleased. Despite living with me, she
pretty much walks into any movie completely cold at this point. She
doesn't do spoilers.
And over the last few years, she finally decided that she really
doesn't even want to see trailers. If I can't describe a movie to her in
two sentences that she seems interested by, she's not going to see it.

I've heard the arguments by people like Robert Zemeckis
that you have to do that now or audiences won't go, but that runs so
counter to everything I've heard from people in real life that I'm
wondering if there's any intersect between the conventional industry
thinking and what audiences actually want. I have to include myself in
the "part of the problem" column, and I have been thinking about it
recently. Like everyone publishing online, I live and die based on
traffic, and traffic is generated in a number of ways. It would be
disingenuous to pretend that we do not depend on a certain amount of
traffic generated by content that other people source and link to.
Publishing something unique, something that people are curious about, is
a part of this business, and I think there is a balance that I continue
to try to define between feeding the curiosity of the audience and
respecting the process by the filmmakers.

Here's where the confusion and the struggle gets weird. Let's take a Robert Zemeckis film, for example. When I covered movies like "What Lies Beneath" or "Cast Away,"
I did not reveal plot details while they were in production. I did
discuss things that were not public knowledge based on my own reporting
at the time, but I did my best not to give too much away. In both cases,
I would argue that the trailers that the films cut revealed more than I
ever would have. They did it with a disregard that I almost found
shocking. These days, I see trailers routinely use images from the last
act of the film, and sometimes the final images of the movies, and those
images are part of the marketing, sometimes from the very first teaser
trailer on. That seems like madness to me.

This article is a must read and its something I've been talking about for a long time. It's good to see this pop up on the other side of the spectrum as well.

Fire Up the Quattro has post a brief report about the discussion of streaming, downloading and piracy at SANA.

Funimation appears to be doing what they can to keep again in the
game with offering their own streaming, collectors DVD sets and BluRay
and keeping ahead in the game. But I think it’s important as anime fans
we really be conscious of the numbers involved and the economics
because:

If licensers lose money, and cannot buy titles, it means less anime
in America, and will affect anime production in Japan because studios
also don’t get the income of selling these titles for US distributing
Meaning less anime FOR ANYONE.

While we have become the instant gratification generation with so
much available to give us things in minutes, we also need to remember as
much as this is a hobby, we are also consumers of a product and if we
pirate that product, in the end everyone ends up losing.

From “Robotech” to “Naruto,” Japanese animation — or anime — has
grown from a small niche market to a multibillion-dollar industry in the
United States.

Experts gathered in Aurora to speak about the genre’s rise in
popularity in the U.S. at the Summit on Anime in North America on March
23 at the Denver Airport Marriott at Gateway Park.

“What makes anime so special in America?” said Jeremy Pieta,
co-secretary of Rocky Mountain Anime Association (RMAA). “There’s not a
whole lot of academic discussion about it.”

The event, co-sponsored by RMAA and the Consulate-General of Japan in
Denver, explored anime’s history in the U.S., particularly the 1980s
boom that launched its success.

Anime showed that cartoons were not just for kids, something that had
been lacking since “The Flintstones,” said Kevin McKeever, vice
president of marketing for Harmony Gold, the company that brought
“Robotech” to America.

Monday, March 25, 2013

Is it the culture? Could it be the quality of animated work or the
storylines? Or, perhaps it's something so intrinsic that it's unique to
every person who discovers it?

The Consulate-General of Japan
in Denver and the Rocky Mountain Anime Association hosted SANA try and
find the reason why, with the blessings of the Japanese government. This
is the first time Japan has explored this issue in North America.

Monday, March 18, 2013

Examiner.com has posted an interview with Robotech: The Shadow Chronicles Scott Glasgow and here is a excerpt.

Robotech: Shadow Chronicles also marked
your very first soundtrack release by the great label, Varese Sarabande.
How did you feel when they decided to release the music to that film?

SG: Robotech was also a big moment for me as a
composer because as my childhood dream of someday having an album
released by Varese Sarabande was realized! It was a huge deal for me. I
still thank Robert Townson for deciding to do it. I am betting the fact
that Robotech was a well known franchise had contributed to that
decision. As a side note, I just finished working on arrangements for
the forthcoming film “ROBOTECH: LOVE, LIVE, ALIVE” so there is more
Robotech coming your way soon.

Thursday, March 7, 2013

One weekend last October, Robert Iger, chief executive officer of Walt Disney (DIS), sat through all six Star Wars
films. He’d seen them before, of course. This time, he took notes.
Disney was in secret negotiations to acquire Lucasfilm, the company
founded by Star Wars creator George Lucas, and Iger needed to do some due diligence.

The
movies reacquainted Iger with Luke Skywalker, the questing Jedi Knight,
and his nemesis Darth Vader, the Sith Lord who turns out to be
(three-decade-old spoiler alert) his father. Beyond the movies, Iger
needed to know Lucasfilm had a stockpile of similarly rich material—aka
intellectual property—for more Star Wars installments. As any serious
aficionado knows, there were always supposed to be nine. But how would
Disney assess the value of an imaginary galaxy? What, for example, was
its population?

As it turned out, Lucas had already done the
cataloging. His company maintained a database called the Holocron, named
after a crystal cube powered by the Force. The real-world Holocron
lists 17,000 characters in the Star Wars universe inhabiting several thousand planets over a span of more than 20,000 years. It was quite a bit for Disney to process.

Monday, March 4, 2013

Former Bandai Director of Marketing Robert Napton sits down with Anime News Network to talk about how he got into the anime industry and his time at Bandai USA.There are quite a few interesting connections to the Robotech franchise, the Macross derivatives along with a discussion of the early years of anime.

The podcast also goes in-depth talk about the closure of Bandai Entertainment USA and the long, strange and sudden odyssey the company went through in its final years.